THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: VoL. XXX JUSTIFICATION G The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. JULY, 1966 No.8 IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY OD'S revelation is a Prophetic Word interpretative of events within history; moreover it is addressed to men living in a world bounded by time and space and so subject to constant change. This suffices to explain that theology born out of this revelation is of itself always relevant to the human situation. The Divine Word has inexhaustible intelligibilities, and man's discovery of these is qualified somewhat by the situation out of which he lays hold of that Word. Man's angle of approach determines which of its intelligibilities will come into focus for him. This polarity of objective truth and subjective situation is a tension indigenous to theology. Recent theological endeavors within Catholicism-at least since 1958-have evidenced a definite newness of situation. At least where justification is concerned, this present stance, while amounting to an abrupt reaction against the immediate past on one hand, is on the other a harkening back to a more WILLIAM J. HILL ancient era of Christian theology, one that antecedes the Reformation and offers correctives to its dislocation of theological endeavor. These new directions in thought can be viewed as a liberation of certain virtualities of truth that have lain dormant within the faith; they are not emerging clothed in identical categories of thought and language, but they do reveal that their roots lie in past achievements within tradition. This serves two purposes: it gives substance to thinking that otherwise might appear ephemeral; and it supplies cautions to those exaggerations which the spirit of this age lends itself to. The following reflections are intended not as a survey but rather as an attempted systematization 1 (necessarily tentative) of certain basic tendencies that manifest this continuity. Any such attempt must originate from and be dominated by certain basic intuitions, which serve as principles of unity and order in intelligibility. Those operative here derive from the theology of St. Thomas; for the rest it has been necessary, where the suggestiveness of contemporary theological writing is concerned, to exercise some personal options in selecting what harmonizes and rejecting what does not. As for procedurefirst, an objection to the very possibility of doing this must be met; secondly, the synthesis itself ranged on three points: I) man's radical justification in creation and predestination, 2) his formal justification in the transformation by grace, and 3) some brief references to the ecclesial dimensions of this latter. 1 The somewhat limited nature of this attempt is explained in part by the fact of the present paper being presented originally as one part of a symposium held at La Salle College in Philadelphia in December, 1965, where it was preceded by a study of Justification from a Biblical standpoint presented by Rev. Aelred Lacomara, C. P., (St. Michael's Monastery, Union City, New Jersey) and complemented by studies of the problem in Lutheran theology by Rev. Clarence Lee, (Lutheran Theological Seminary, Germantown, Pennsylvania) and from an ecumenical viewpoint by Rev. Arthur Crabtree, (Eastern Baptist Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia) . JUSTIFICATION I. AN OBJECTION: IN CATHOLIC THE THEOLOGY THE CouNCIL THEOLOGY TODAY CoNSOLIDATED ARoUND OF TRENT 1. Conciliar Pronouncements and Evolution of Dogma Undeniably, Catholic discussion of justification for the past four centuries has been dominated by the pronouncements of the Council of Trent. This is as it should be, yet it has resulted in the peculiar phenomenon of theology in its very distinctness from faith losing its nerve and suffering a dis-location from at least one of its proper tasks, that of a continuing and creative re-thinking of the intelligibilities inherent in God's Word infallibly attested to by the Church. This may be understandable in the light of the dangers which then threatened the life of the Church, and in a limited understanding of what theological endeavor was supposed to be, but for all of that it was an infelicitous turn of events. Doctrinal pronouncements should be seen not as an end but as a beginning; not as closing off speculation but precisely as providing the norms for authentic deepening of the understanding that lies at the heart of faith. Conciliar teachings are always true; they are irrevocable; no discontinuity is discernible between earlier and later definitions. At the same time they are not and do not pretend to be exhaustive or integral; their truthfulness is not absolute but relative, yet without any trace of relativism. Contemporary Catholic theology is nearly unanimous not only in affirming a true development of dogma, but further in construing such evolution as more than the mere logical explicitation of what is already implicit in existing formulations and definitions. The historicity of all human existence, and therefore of Christian existence, demands acknowledging the temporally conditioned nature of dogma; it enables us to understand that the Church's utterances even when infallible are still spoken out of a limited horizon of knowledge. The object of faith after all is uncreated; the human conception and propositional formulation of it is always a hold on such truth at one historical moment and from a finite perspective. All such Q08 WILLIAM J. HILL formulae of faith transcend themselves, not because they are untrue, but precisely because they are true. 2 This includes even the divinely inspired expressions of sacred Scripture. The very commitment to language gives rise to a problem that is not simply semantic but truly hermaneutical. However, it is an over-simplification to dismiss the difficulty (as do some present day Catholic thinkers) by merely separating doctrine from formulation, and saying that faith lays hold of the former, reaching through the expressions which can always be rejected. This amounts to theological relativism and leads to thinking that all formulae are merely approximations, equally expressive of truth. More radically, it is to deny the humanness of faith by supposing that there can be faith without intelligible content. More helpful in this area is the three-fold distinction used by Karl Rahner between the Unchangeable Object of faith; the truth expressed in doctrinal formulae; and the mode of expression in which such are presented. 3 Unsurprisingly, no developed theory of such doctrinal evolution can be found in St. Thomas; and the evidence does not favor Marin-Sola's opinion that the proximate principles for such a theory are there. 4 At the same time, that the fact of authentic evolution 2 Cf. Karl Rahner: Theological Investigations, Vol. I, Essay on "The Development of Dogma," p. 44, Baltimore and London, 1961. 8 Schriften zur Theologie, Vol. IV, 1960, "Theol. Prinzipien der Hermeneutik eschatologischer Aussagen "; this volume has not yet appeared in english but Rahner suggests the distinction in Vol. I (translated as Theological Investigations) in the essay "Development of Dogma," p. 44 ff; in a footnote he equates the first two members of the distinction with St. Thomas' " res intellecta " and the "intellectum." • Cf. F. Marin-Sola, 0. P.: L'Evolution homogene du Dogme catholique, Fribourg, vols.). The theory for which Marin-Sola finds a basis in St. Thomas amounts to a doctrinal development only "quoad nos" and necessitates positing a virtual Revelation which reason under the light of faith attains to by a process of logical inference from the propositions of fornLal Revelation. St. Thomas however seems little concerned with " theological conclusions" in this precise sense, and more given to discerning new and deepening intelligibilities within formal Revelation, through an exercise of "ratio illustrata a fide" but in ways other than the logical or strictly demonstrative; this latter is more suggestive of the type of doctrinal evolution now coming into focus. In fairness to Marin-Sola he does allow for other processes in the course of development, e. g. one through JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY 209 was at least not alien to the thought of St. Thomas is suggested by these words from the Secunda Secundae: " ... among men, the knowledge of faith has to proceed from imperfection to perfection." 5 In brief, this is to say that though conciliar definitions are truly normative for theology, there remains the prior theological task of studying these within the context of history to discern their genuine meaning. 6 They need not always represent a unique line of progression over past definitions. On the other hand, it hardly needs to be said that as genuine confessions of the Church they are not to be dismissed as mere projections of ecclesiastical anthropology. 2. The Historical Conditionedness of the Decisions of Trent Recent historical scholarship has tended practically without exception to point out an orientation in Trent that was unsystematic and fragmentary. An instance in case is the perhaps definitive though still incomplete work of Hubert Jedin. 7 The intent of the Conciliar fathers was largely polemical and defensive, occasioned by the disruption of ecclesiastical order during the Reformation. Various necessities had to be provided for and there was no pretense at offering any integral solutions to problems. Very much in evidence was an avowed lack of any clear understanding as to the nature of the church; emphasis was thrown almost exclusively upon the visible face, the hierarchial structure of the church; the role of Sacred Scripture affective or experiential knowledge (cf. Vol. I, Chap. 4), but these for the most part sub-serve the speculative way. Even so, his work is the best fruit of the ninteenth century controversies, and remains historically an indispensable counterpart to the studies of Newman. • Summa Theol., II-II, q. 1, a. 7, ad 3um. 6 The inestimable value, for instance, of reading the earlier, rejected drafts of schemas that are finally accepted within a Council has been graphically shown by recent studies on Trent as well as by the experiences of Vatican II; for example the drafts on religious liberty from the latter are considerably instructive. 7 Hubert Jedin: Das Konzil von Trient, Freiburg in Breisgau, Vol. 1 (1949), Vol. £ (1957) ; These two volumes are available in an english translation; History of the Council of Trent, Herder and Herder, N. Y. WILLIAM J. HILL was left obscure; and much to our point here, the division within Christianity, both institutional and spiritual, was accepted as fact. Beyond this, however, is the phenomenon of the decrees of Trent gaining long after the Council had adjourned a status seemingly unique in all of Christian tradition. 8 They became the norm for all of Christian belief and conduct, so that Trent stands isolated from the tradition that preceded it, indeed the earlier tradition becomes as it were funneled through Trent. A definitely Tridentine epoch comes into being, during which certain institutional factors and even organizational practices are engrafted onto the Conciliar teachings. The First Vatican Council was absorbed completely into this system consolidated around Trent, but with the summoning of Vatican II the tide began clearly and irreversibly to change. To speak of the end of the Counter Reform may be somewhat histrionic, but it is also close to the truth. In 1546 the Council laid down its decisions on Justification; their conditionedness, both historical and polemical, needs to be taken into consideration. "Sola fide" was condemned as a vain and presumptuous confidence, but in the Council's own understanding of this phrase, without any indication that this is indeed what Luther understood by these words, and without any attempt to indicate the orthodox meaning that can be given to the phrase. Recent Lutheran studies 9 insist that "imputation " is used by Luther in an exclusively forensic sense (patterned upon the language of St. Paul in Romans) so that it does not exclude in any contradictory sense an intrinsic renovation of the creature by grace. The decisions of Trent were certainly not intended as either a denial or an affirmation of this; indeed it is historically true that the insistence upon an intrinsically inhering quality as the " causa unica juBtificatiords" was directed against the "two-fold righteousness" 8 Cf. Giuseppe Alberigo: "The Council of Trent," in Concilium, Vol. 7, 1965, p. 83. • E. g., R Kosters: "Luther's These: Gerecht und Siinder Zugleich," Catholica, 1964, No. 18; C. Berkouwer: "Verdienste der Gnade? ", Kamper, 1958. JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY 9lll theory of its own papal legate, the Augustinian Seripando. Finally there are the repercussions resulting from the long dominance of late Medieval theology by Nominalism and Voluntarism (these have always been, perhaps unsurprisingly, bedfellows); and a long line can be traced from Scotus to Occam to the theologians immediately preceding the Council such as Gabriel Biel, Gregory of Rimini, and Von Usingen who was the teacher of Luther at the University of Urfurt_l 0 It was the insistence of the Augustinian theologians at the Council that resulted in the exclusion of only merits " de condigno " from man's preparation for grace. Nothing is said of merits " de congruo "-but this can hardly be interpreted as a positive defense by the Council of the Scotistic position on congruous merits; a position unacceptable to Reformation theology and actually opposed by the Thomistic theologians at the Council. Thus it is an erroneous procedure to seek to find in the decisions of Trent a solution ready-made to the questions posed in contemporary theological research. 11 II. AN ATTEMPTED SYNTHESIS 1. Radical Ju8tification in Creation and Prede8tination Brought into being out of nothingness and standing in conscious self-awareness, man poses to himself a primal question. He seeks in effect to ju8tify himself, the fact that he "is." And in fact his being is justified, in the relationship he bears to the prototype of himself existent eternally in the creative depths of God; he is justified in the mystery that he is the Imago Dei, "Let us make man to our image and Likeness" (Gen. 1 : 26) . The infra-rational creature is without such justification. 1 ° Cf. the illuminating study of H. A. Oberman: The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Harvard U. Press, 1963. 11 On the Scripture-Tradition question, for instance, the Anglican William Palmer has pointed out that an earlier, rejected draft of "in Sacred Scripture and in traditions " read " partly in Sacred Scripture and partly in traditions"; thus the approved text can hardly be interpreted as favoring the "two-source theory." WILLIAM J. HILL However, this imaging of God needs to be taken seriously; it demands the acknowledgment that such imitation is impossible on the level of nature itself, and so is a primordial transformation within man's nature, having as its consequence that man now transcends the rest of the universe, and is a true counterpart to God from within the creaturely sphere. This is to say that the creation of man out of nothingness was at the very same time, by a pure contingency of God's love, a totally unexacted elevation to where his being opens out onto the Divine. It would not appear to over-state the truth to add that God would not have created man had he not intended to re-generate him-for all his non-deity-into adoptive but genuine sonship. It is this which legitimatizes man, which justifies his existence. This uniqueness of man's being, existentially supernatural, trans-finalized towards the Divine Object, means that he is unable to be defined integrally, in his very humaness, apart from this elevation. In the realm of freedom the object or end is formally determinative; 12 it makes the free reality (the decision and the person so disposing himself) to be what it is morally and humanly. True enough, beneath all this is a natural substratum or substructure, man's natural endowment of spirit. But even this, his pure nature, precisely because it is openess to and capacity for the Divine, cannot be easily strictured within the Aristotelian category of " physis "; by his essence man is above " nature," he transcends the cosmological universe; to define him as a rational animal is to characterize him in only one, and a vastly inferior, dimension of his being. St. Thomas speaks explicitly of the soul's natural capacity for grace; 13 as in the birth-pangs of Christian theology Tertullian had written of" homo naturaliter Christianus." Cajetan notes that 19 Summa Theol., I-11, q. 1, a. 3: " ... actus morales proprie speciem sortiuntur ex fine: nam idem sunt actus morales et actus humani." 13 Op. cit., I-11, q. 113, a. 10: " ... justificatio impii non est miraculosa: quia naturaliter anima est gratiae capax; eo enim ipso quod facta est ad imaginem Dei, capax est Dei per gratiam, ut Augustinus dicit." JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY 213 it is inexact to refer to grace as created, 14 and John of St. Thomas while concurring suggests a certain impropriety even in the word " infused," preferring to speak of grace being educed from an obediential potency that is none other than the very nature of the souU 5 Cajetan even writes of grace as " in some sense natural, in some sense not natural," since the soil into which alone it can be implanted is the free act educed from the natural potency of the soul, such free activity being a necessary disposition to the achievement of grace. 16 It is misleading to characterize this in excessively negative terms as a mere non-repugnance. Theologically this capacity for grace rests upon man's being in his very nature the Imago Dei. On the purely natural level, however, this imaging is only representational, i. e., man in knowing and loving his human values merely represents, on a scale of being infinitely lower qualitatively, God's knowledge and love of self. The superior image of conformity, which is achieved in an intentional identity with the object of knowledge and love, is impossible 14 Comm. in I-II, q. 112, a. 1: " ... non proprie fit, et consequenter nee creatur; sed dicitur creari, quia non educitur de potentia subjecti, nee datur ex meritis." 15 Cursus Theologicus, Disp. XXV, art. I, no. 3: " ... gratia non creatur, cum producatur tamquam accidens inhaerens; ergo producitur in subjecto et ex subjecto, non ex nihilo .... " Ibid., no. 8: " ... gratia non creatur physice (moraliter enim dicitur in Scriptura creari quia datur sine meritis) sed per actionem eductivam producitur, quia producitur ut inhaerens in subjecto, et sic non infunditur sicut anima quae creatur in corpore . . . gratia autem producitur ut accidens inhaerens subjecto et pendens ab illo, et sic non creatur. Dicitur autem contineri in subjecto a quo educitur secundum potentialem obedientialem, non naturalem; quia entitative non est aliud quam ipsa natura animae, respective autem dicit ipsum entitatem ut subjectam supernaturali agenti. . . ." 16 Op. cit., q. 113, a. 10, no. IV and V: "Alio modo, sic quod propria dispositio educatur de potentia subjecti, sed non per agens naturale, claudendo sub naturali agente totum ordinem naturae. Et tunc est potentia quodammodo naturalis, et quodammodo non naturalis .... ex eo autem quod ilia dispositio educibilis est de potentia propria, quandam naturalitatem habet. Et hoc modo potentia animae ad gratiam est quodammodo naturalis, pro quanto actus liberi arbitrii quo praeparatur ad gratiam, educitur de potentia naturali liberi arbitrii. . . . Et quia medium nunc hoc, nunc illud inducit extremum; ideo potentia animae ad gratiam quandoque naturalis, quandoque non naturalis, sed obedientialis aut supernaturalis vocatur." WILLIAM J. HILL where God is concerned apart from the re-creation and elevation of grace. Nonetheless, St. Thomas describes the image of representation as an aptitude for the image of conformity. 17 An aptitude for something is more than mere non-repugnance; at the same time it is not necessarily an exigence for the higher order of which it is somehow capable. The actual implementation of the aptitude for grace is no wise within the capacities of man's nature; this remains utterly gratuitous and does effect a real elevation of that nature. 18 This orientation to grace from within nature can then accurately be described as positive yet purely passive. Irrespective of how one nuances theologically this order to grace, there remains the all important fact for the believer that man's nature was "de facto" so elevated in its very creation, and actually ordered to the vision of God. 19 What does all this mean where justification is concerned? Only this, that as an inseparable element within the eternal creative decrees calling man out of nothingness, there occurs a primordial justification and this is: first of all, exclusively God's act; how could it be in any fashion man's since it occurs before man is, anteceding even that act which would be man's free consent to the elevation of his nature-and secondly is characterized by universality; its extension to all men without exception. Every re-achievement of justification will take place against the background of this initial and unqualified gratuity Op. cit., I, q. 93, a. 4. Thus the natural desire for the vision of God of which St. Thomas speaks (Summa Theol., I, q. 1£, a. 1; I-II, q. 3, a. 8; Ill Contra Gentes, 50), which betrays this aptitude for elevation to the supernatural, remains itself conditional and inefficacious. 10 Perhaps this is what is meant to be conveyed by the " existenz " of German existential thought and the authentic existence of " Dasein " in Heideggerian terms, i.e., the natural openess of spirit to the Divine. More probably, however, as Rahner and others have suggested, it could amount to an implicit awareness of the supernatural dimension (not recognized as such, of course) which characterizes existentially all human existence. To some extent contemporary Catholic theology is being influenced by these tendencies of thought (e. g., the influence of Heidegger upon Max Muller and J. B. Lotz, as well as Rahner), but for the most part it appears to be simply a case of a common historical situation giving similar directions to both Catholic and non-Catholic thought. 17 18 JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY and universality. Though this occurs outside of history it does not occur outside of nature. The supernatural order is structured within nature; nature and grace can never be confused, they stand over against one another, yet " de facto" creation exists only within an order that is existentially supernatural. Grace is not so much something added on to nature (a superstructure above or alongside of nature) as a transformation within nature itself. The loss of this divinization does not leave nature intact; man's fallen state in original sin is that of a deprived but still somehow supernaturalized being; its privation being not the return to a natural condition, but a negative qualification of man's very quiddity, accidental and existential, yet ontic and real. Original sin thus amounts to a dis-jointedness, an alienation within a nature that retains an order to the Beatific Vision. 20 In this way, Catholic theology tends today to envision a radical " de-secularization " of this world; salvation is seen as really offered to all men; and the possibility is open to anonymous revelation and an implicit faith truly salvific (implicit, not so much cognitionally and logically as in a moral or existential sense) .21 Obviously, however, justification has in Biblical language a narrower sense, one involving God's foreknowledge and permission of the Fall, and implying the rectification of a condition of un-righteousness. The alienation resulting from man's primal sin is such that justification can now only be in virtue of a new bestowal of salvation, the initiative of which is once again solely God's. There is however a major difference, for now salvation is offered entirely in a human mode, offered by God but as He breaks into man's history and assumes a human existence. Justification thus takes upon itself a dimension of 20 This order is first of all something negative, explained by original sin as a privation within a once elevated nature (analogous perhaps to the negative qualification of a blind man's being, in the light of the naturalness of sight), and secondly is based on the actual graces offered, anonymously or otherwise, which while not justifying nature at least "sur-fmm" it in some fashion. The gratuity of grace is no argument for its rarity. 21 Cf. W. J. Hill, 0. P.: "Salvation of the Contemporary Non-Believer," Proceedings: Catholic Theological Society of America, 1963. 216 WILLIAM J. HILL temporality, and in each man involves either looking forward to the Incarnation that is to come or back toward the Incarnation that has occurred. There is now a sense in which man is involved in his own justification, and here the question of merit arises. First of all, the " merits " of Christ are really not merits in the ordinary sense of the term. Justice in God is only distributive and never commutative; and so no humanity, even that of the Word, stands before God in equality. The justification achieved in Christ remains God's free gift to man; it is not merited either condignly or congruously. When the merits of Christ are said to be condign all that is meant is that there is a proportion of objective adequacy between the love inherent in Christ's obedience and the hatred inherent in man's rebellion; and that God does not merely condone the latter but rectifies it, and does so from within human history. What is true of Christ's universal merits is far more radically true of what are called the " merits " of the righteous man; these do not mean that man " earns " the reward of eternal life so much as that he accepts eternal life within an historical process. The very grace itself as implanted within the soul that is human is thereby subject to a law of organic growth; a process of intensification within the subject achieved by God's appropriating through created grace man's free activities. What occurs takes place in this universe of freedom, not in the cosmological universe, since a meritorious act is necessarily a free one. Finite freedom, however, has no causal influence whatsoever upon Uncreated Freedom; it is improper then to speak of God" committing" Himself to reward certain acts. Uncreated Freedom simply chooses to realise itself creatively in a human mode, i. e., within human freedom, and thus there is " no distinction between what is from the second cause and what is from the first cause." 22 In this way of looking at things, 22 St. Thomas, Summa Theol., I, q. 23, a. 5: "Non est autem distinctum quod est ex libero arbitrio, et ex praedestinatione; sicut nee est distinctum quod est ex causa secunda, et causa prima: divina enim providentia producit effectus per operationes caus11XU!Il secundarum. . . ." JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY 217 there is simply no place for so-called congruous merits where first grace is concerned. All preparation for grace is itself a grace. This can, I believe, be confirmed within the context of predestination, and once again the gratuity and universality of salvific grace shown. Christs' redemptive act means the offer of salvation for all without exception. If the eternal decree of God here implemented be real, then it must be creative, i. e., productive in every man of grace truly sufficient for salvation. Occurring within the depths of the free human personality this initial unmerited graciousness of God may meet with resistence and thus be rendered inefficacious, or not resisted and then the grace fructifies of itsel£.23 In the latter case the will's free consent does not cause the fructification of the grace, rather the grace fructifies into the free act. The non-justification of those who resist God's love is thus accountable to themselves; the justification of others remains God's free gift. Four new emphases mark this contemporary Catholic picture of justification: (I) it is utterly gratuitous; (2) it is structured within rather than alongside human freedom; (3) it is extended to all men (allowing however for rejection); (4) it is in strong reaction to any overtones of a semi-Pelagianistic nature. On this latter point, the controversy between Thomists and Molinists would seem to be no longer an issue. 2. Transformation Creation" of Man by Justification into a "New Only Christ is our righteousness-but still He is our righteousness. If justification be God's gift, it is nonetheless to be found in man; the very notion of " gift " demanding not only a 23 The possibility of refusing and thus "frustrating" God's graces rests upon His free decision that these initial graces be fallible or frustratible. This gives rise to an ultimate question, one which as St. Augustine notes man cannot presume to answer lest he wish to err, as to why the ontological disposition of soul, prior to all activity, is in some men " openess " to grace and in others resistence thereto. Nevertheless, to understand that the very first "moment" in the economy of salvation is a grace given to all men that is truly efficacious in its own order (i.e., as summoning to justification) does help to explain how the lack of justification is finally due to a refusal on man's part for which he alone is responsible. 218 WILLIAM J. HILL donor but also a beneficiary. The very fact of "being made just " implies a transformation, a renewal of some sort within man. " If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation," writes St. Paul (I Cor. 5 : 17). Further expressions of Sacred Scripture leave little doubt as to the sublimity of what takes place: there is a " giving " to us of the Spirit, with whom we are " anointed " and " sealed "; man is now " with God " and " of God." The emphasis is decidedly on Uncreated Grace, and recent Catholic thinking tends strongly in this direction, yet without thereby excluding a created effect within man. Justification is thus an appropriation, a possession of the soul by the Holy Spirit, not solely as He is within the Trinity but precisely as inexisting man. If it be established exegetically that "pneuma" in St. Paul many times refers to a created spirit (i. e., " the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by a holy spirit, which is given to us "; Rom. 5 : 5) , nevertheless it remains true that the primary signification from which the others are derived is that of the personal Spirit of the Father and of Christ; Who is at once the " earnest" of what is to come and the very accomplishment of our present righteousness. The Uncreated Spirit is sent by the glorified Christ ("I will not leave you orphans"; John 14 : 17) , thus only after His ascension (" If I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you"; John 16: 7), and so once again within the context of an economy that is human and historical, within the strictures of time and place. Contact with the " Pneuma " issues in conforming union with the Son who brings us before the Father; the justified soul is caught up into the inner- Trinitarian life and enters upon familiar and proper relations with the Divine Subsistences; man is conformed to the humanity of Christ and thus to the eternal Word, and so he imitates in his own grace-life the relationships, both eternal and temporal, of the Son to the Father whence he proceeds, and to the Spirit issuing from them both. A re-examination of these Biblical notions is occasioning new emphases, or perhaps more accurately new conceptions, where the theology of justification is concerned. Several of them deserve mention. JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY Hypostatic Union. It is conceivable that only the Second Person of the Trinity as a Son, an all perfect Image of the Father, could express "ad extra" that perfect imaging of the Father to which mankind is called; and thus that only he could have become Incarnate within the chosen economy. 24 St. Thomas' clear teaching that each or all of the Divine Persons could have become flesh is thus only an indication of abstract possibilities intended to throw light on what the Hypostatic Union is ontologically. 25 What follows from this is that man can be understood in an integral sense only in the light of the Incarnation, and thus remotely in the revelation of the Trinity; Christian anthropology thus finding its roots in Christology. It is the doctrine of the Trinity which ultimately delivers to us the answer to the question " what is salvation," and the underlying question " what is man." Uncreated Grace. However true this may be, recent Catholic thinking has evidenced to a considerable extent an explanation of Uncreated grace that simply does not appear to stand the test of theological analysis. The union or conjunction of God and soul in justification is seen as immediate, resulting from an initiative of God's that antecedes any production by Him of created graces. This has been variously described, most notably as a "created actuation by uncreated Grace" (De la Taille) or as a "quasi-formal causality" (K. Rahner) . It is difficult to see how this is not a dangerous anthropomorphizing, which if it does not slight the transcendence of God, does at least forget the consequences of man's creatureliness, his "alterity" before God. It has not been explained how the "having" of God by the justified can be other than terminative, 26 supposing a logically prior elevation that is a genuine trans2 • This suggestion has been advanced by Aloys Grillmeier in the article "Christologie" in Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, Vol. II, 1160, as well as by Karl Rahner: " Reflections theologiques sur !'Incarnation," Sciences Ecclesiastiques, 1960, p. 5 ff. 26 Summa Theol., III, q. 3, a. 5; that this is all St. Thomas intends becomes clear when article 5 is read in the light of the previous four articles of the same question. 26 This is the clear teaching of St. Thomas, cf. Summa Theol., I, q. 43, a. 3. WILLIAM J. HILL formation, thus something ontic; an elevation that is demanded if the gratuity of God's gift is to be preserved. To suppose otherwise is to conceive of the resulting relation between God and man as something autonomous and absolute, a pure medium which (unable to have a fundament in a changeless God) does not demand any foundation in man, and so is not an accident of his being. Created Grace. Important too, is a reaction against a misconception of sanctifying grace, a gross mis-construing of it as a "thing," as something cosmic, deriving from an overly univocal understanding of terms such as " quality " and "habitus." When grace is called a created accident this does not mean that the just man now has a new accident distinct from his substance in the categories of physical nature; that grace is put into him automatically-but only that he is now accidentally divinized through an operation of the Holy Spirit that truly recreates him. The implications of St. Thomas' phrase here are too often overlooked: " It is men who are created according to it (i.e., grace), that is, constituted thereby in newness of being." 27 What needs stressing is the dynamic character of grace; its occurence within freedom as a state of consciousness, a restoration of the human personality now energized to where it can enter the sphere and life of God; rendering possible the "having" of God in the only way possible, i. e., as term in acts of knowledge and love. It is true that sanctifying grace is conceived of as lying below the threshold of consciousness, but it is there precisely as the root of conscious activity, and if, logically speaking, dispositions (entitative or operative) enjoy a subjective priority over activity; essentially and formally the case is the inverse. Thus God makes donation of Himself in the perduring " habitus " of grace; much as spouses are given to each other in the state of marriage and not only in the consummating acts of that state. And, in fact, the very habitualness of grace alone makes possible the co-existence of sin (acts of venial sin, that is) and 27 Op. cit., I-ll, q. llO, a. 2, ad 3um. JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY 221 the state of justification. This may be the closest Catholic approximation to Luther's "simul justus et peccator." 28 Faith. Along these same lines is the renewed emphasis being given today to the personal nature of faith, representing a return to St. Thomas' understanding when he writes in the Secunda Secundae: " In any form of belief, it seems that it is the person to whose words the assent is given, who is of principal importance, and as it were the end; while the individual truths through which one assents to that person are secondary." 29 This is further clarified in the affectivity that is involved in the act of belief, in the awareness that the intellect's assent is made under pressure from the will. What occurs is less an act of objective understanding than a subjective and existential awareness of Christ as "my salvation," of the forgiveness of sins he offers as an answer in experience to my inner longing for salvation. Moreover this initial experience originates from a divine initiative (" ex instinctu divino ") ; "God's self-revelation in the believer remains His own wholly original and proper deed " in which there is " an actual mediation of salvation by God at the present moment." 30 Thus a somewhat new notion of time seems to characterize the graceexperience (not replacing but complementing the Aristotelian " measure of motion ") in which man is summoned by God to 28 This is not what Luther intended; he does seem to mean that sin unto death remains somehow in the baptised person, though it may be one more instance of the typically Lutheran tolerance for what is at least paradoxical if not contradictory; cf. Justification Today, Studies and Reports on the Fourth Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation in Helsinki, 1963, published by Lutheran World, New York, p. 23 ff.; also helpful is Gordon Rupp: The Righteousness of God: A reconsideration of the character and works of Martin Luther, London, 1953. The Helsinki report mentioned above takes exception to Hans Kung's suggestion (Justification, The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection, London, New York and Toronto, 1964) that the Catholic practice of confession amounts to an acceptance of Luther's position, seeing in this a misunderstanding of Luther's true meaning, p. 42. 20 Summa Theol., II-II, q. 11, a. l. 30 S. Pfiirtner, 0. P.: Luther and Aquinas: A Conversation, London, 1964, pp. 56 and 57. WILLIAM J. HILL his own personal time and to decision in which events of the past are given a new kind of presentiality. Theological Virtues. Allied with this is a new endeavor to view faith, hope, and charity not as three different endowments of the soul but as three formalities distinguishable within one total religious response. The assent of faith which demands some intelligible content also involves of itself a trust that may be called, when abstractly isolated from the formality of assent, hope. At least the compartmentalizing of the Christian response to Christ does tend to distort somewhat its personal, unified nature. Infusion. Where the term " infusion" is concerned, there is need to remember that the unity of first and second causes is such that what man does, God does. So that infusion is less accurately presented as a quasi-miraculous working of God than a human action under a divine initiative opening up the self to God under three distinct formalities. This is to approach the notion of infusion from the side of formal object rather than from that of agent. Certitude of Salvation. Also, it might be noted in passing that the elaboration of faith by hope introduces into the response of the justified man a new element of certitude. This is not now the cognitional certitude of faith (with which alone Trent dealt in affirming an objective certitude of this kind while eliminating any subjective certitude as a "vain confidence ") but an affective certitude of personal aspiration towards eternal life; an unswerving movement whose certitude is not conditional but absolute since the power which implements this inclination is the merciful saving will of God-not man's present grace, much less his merits. Surely this is a Catholic formulation of Luther's fiduciary faith! 3. The Ecclesial Dimension to Justification Lastly, in the event of justification there has been a sharp focusing upon elements that are ecclesial and sacramental. JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY !2!28 The starting point here is an anthropological one, making rich use of the concept of " encounter " borrowed from Phenomenological thought. Human existence is radically different from that which places infra-rational things outside of nothingness; it presupposes a " logos " structure to all of reality as it comes to pass in man as consciousness, therein assuming meaning. I£ this meaning fundamentally derives from things as they exist in consciousness, in a more formal sense it is extended to things in a human appropriation of them. It carries the implication that in every event there is discoverable something of mystery, that beyond all facticity there lies authenticity. This "logos" character is first of all, then, the structure of all reality as it is brought onto the level of human existence; but secondly it becomes the scaffolding, as it were, within which the Uttered Word addressed to faith can occur. The contact between God and man thus takes upon itself a specifically human quality; God's act is not so much a breaking into history from without as it is a case of God's love assuming human form in visibility and historicity. The difference between the two modes of expression is that in the former God's intervention is thought of as frequently set over against man's endeavors, in the latter the entire process of humanization (with the one exception of sin) is itself the effect of one harmonious divine causality. 31 This is obvious enough in the instance of the Incarnation where " God addresses man as a man, among men," 32 but is now being extended to the entirety of religious experience. Two consequences of this deserve mentioning. First, it tends to give to the contact with God and Christ a meta-historical character. The Word of God read in the Church is itself the event of God's self-disclosure, assuming a dialectical aspect, a 81 On the natural level this harmonizes well with the teaching of St. Thomas on the universality and exclusivity of God's causality in the production of being as such, including that of action; the resulting ubiquity of God (Summa Theol., I, q. 8); the immediacy of his providence (op. cit., q. 22), etc. On the supernatural level it emphasizes the continuity of grace with the order of created spirit without, of course, any lessening of the total gratuity of the former. 32 E. Schillebeeckx, 0. P.: Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter tvith God, New York, 1963, p, xvi. WILLIAM J. HILL note of contemporaneity. In Heideggerian terms this is the historic as opposed to the historical order; or in the Bultmannian use of Heidegger, the sphere of the Christ of faith rather than that of the Jesus of history. This is a present Catholic emphasis, but a very tempered one. On one hand is the fear of illuminism or theological occasionalism; such fear leading to an insistence that the contemporaneity of the Word be measured against an authentic historical meaning attested to in Tradition. On the other hand is the recognition that man's bodiliness roots him first of all in an historical order out of which alone does his " historic " being emerge; the personal " moment " does come, but only out of the past, and the present decision is the summation of many past decisions. When the contact is a sacramental one, however, there appears to be less reluctance on the part of Catholics to stress its "historic" character. Thus the sacramental encounter is seen as a time-transcending advent of God in His humanity involving a rendering present of the very mysteries of His earthly life. Father Schillebeeckx writes: "all the mysteries of the human life of Christ endure forever in the mode of glory"; 33 and these he sees as rendered present in the Sacraments. Here too a caution is needed. There is indeed a genuine encounter with Christ, and one achieved in presentiality, but is not this with the glorified Christ as he is today at the right hand of his Father; is it not a new advent of Christ who now comes to be present in the faith-signs of the believer, and so in a mode proper to faith, i. e., in a world of symbols, in realities of the intentional order? 34 The power of Christ conforms the •• Op. cit., p. 58. •• In six of the sacraments the presence of Christ, while a true and genuine presence, would not seem to be more than a symbolic presence, i. e., it is real only by way of an exercise and influx of his power in and through the sacramental symbols; the Eucharistic presence is different and more than this, being a real presence not merely of Christ's power but of his very human substance. But even in the Eucharist, this presence of the whole Christ "truly, really, and substantially" (in the words of Trent) is sacramental in mode, i.e., not a natural presence in flesh (in this way Christ is only in heaven) , but a sacramental presence in the symbols of bread and wine. Vatican II, mentioning multiple other JUSTIFICATION IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY believer to his risen humanity by appropriating the believer's act of symbolizing Christ's past saving deeds. The Church is not the Incarnation, but its prolongation in a sacramental mode; it is Christ with us not in natural flesh but in symboJ.35 A second consequence to " encounter " is a new emphasis upon the subjective role of the recipient of a sacrament. Apart from the intention demanded for validity, more stess is being laid upon the religious intents of the recipient, his genuine longing for deeper union with Christ, not merely as increasing accidentally the fruitfulness of the reception, but as essential to the sacramental communication of grace. This is what is meant by calling the sacraments "sign"; they are not mere objective symbols of past deeds of Christ and present impersonal effects from God, but symbolic attestings to personal grace, i.e., to an authentic and loving involvement of the self with God in Christ. Unless the act amount to genuine personal prayer it cannot really be encounter with Christ and bring with it increase of grace. There are obvious consequences here for the reviviscence of the sacraments. Also, the initial priority of grace to all human cooperation means that such desire for union with God is itself a grace which (apart from rejection) may or may not fructify into sacramental visibility, thus amounting to either an explicit or an implicit encounter with Christ, a sacramental or an extra-sacramental mediation of salvation. Deriving from this is a quite different perspective on infant baptism-while certainly valid and a genuine sacrament, it canpresences (in his Scriptural word, in the midst of the Church at prayer, etc.) characterizes his presence in the sacraments in general as one "by his power," and merely states that he is present "especially under the Eucharistic species"; Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Chap. I, 7. 85 A more detailed exception to, or at least caution on, Fr. Schillebeeckx's conception of the presence, in the sacramental encounter, of Christ and all the saving events of his earthly life can be found in W. J. Hill: "The Encounter v